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by: Jack Whyte
Two musical events last week set my thoughts swirling and took me, as usual in such cases, in directions I had no idea I wanted to explore.
The first was the death of country singer Merle Haggard, at the age of 79, and the other was a long-postponed evening taken to watch a month-old recording of the November 2015 award ceremony when Willie Nelson, at 82, became the seventh person to receive the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
Two men, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, both achieving front-of-consciousness prominence — for me at least — in the same week, though for vastly different reasons.
Yet old as they may be in terms of years lived, both are destined to remain young forever in the realm of their achievements, individually and collectively.
Each of them took pride in labelling himself an outlaw, though the outlawry they laid claim to was a purely musical distinction.
They were among the founding fraternity of what is now called outlaw music, the group that rebelled in the 1970s against the saccharine sweetness of the stylized, orthodox country music being peddled and promoted by the Grand Ol’ Opry of Nashville.
Repelled by the cloying unctuousness of the Nashville Opry, Willie and Merle threw in their lot with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson and others in establishing a new sub-genre of country music.
It was raw and it was raucous and irreverent and profoundly human, and it’s known today as outlaw music.
Out of that association, depending upon who’s telling the story, emerged the phenomenon known today as the Austin City Sound — a far more free-wheeling and gutsy style of country music than the Nashville variety — that proudly traces its roots back to the rockabilly traditions of the 1950s and Elvis Presley.
What endeared these two men, their colleagues and their entire genre of songs to me originally, though, was the fact that they were, and always will be, storytellers in the grand, traditional sense enjoyed by bards and minstrels since the beginning of time.
They and the others of their ilk are, in a very real and very pertinent contemporary sense, the embodiment of the Spirit of America, the seannachies of the American people, the tribal celebrants of the people’s ways, customs and culture.
Their music is everyman’s. It speaks for, and to, the masses of the people on the most basic, communal level, proving that it is no accident that American country music is the most popular style of music in the western world.
It was at that point, thinking along those lines, that I found myself contemplating the differences between everything that we, as Canadians, respect and admire about the United States and its culture, and the ludicrous spectacle that we see every night on our television screens as the dog and pony show of the Republican party candidacy race unfolds.
In growing disbelief, we sit gawking at the news, watching wide-eyed and slack mouthed as the struggle between a blustering, egotistical fascist and a rabid, right-wing religious fundamentalist grows ever more bitter and contentious. And we are collectively appalled — or most of us are — to realize that these cynical, manipulative demagogues are fighting each other for control over the destiny of the American people.
That said, though, we continue to believe, for the protection of our own sanity, that wisdom will prevail in the end; that the current farce will fizzle out and the contestants will be consigned to the midden with all the other inedible orts from history’s table.
But there is no denying that the unbelievable is actually occurring as we watch. Nor is there any doubt that supposedly knowledgeable, analytical minds are taking these events seriously, with people making dire predictions and assumptions about the implosion, perhaps even the disintegration and demise, of Abe Lincoln’s Grand Old Party.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. We all know that, but at this time, on the GOP side at least, there appears to be no means in sight of arranging a rapprochement between the two leading, rutting billygoats.
The chances of containing the egregious damage they are causing to their party, and to their country’s international image, appear to be dwindling ever day, but even if a miracle occurred and the rabies-like symptoms of both front runners were to disappear, where would the leavening influence come from to heal the open rifts already caused?
Could anyone unknown to this point emerge from the wings to spread healing balm across the ruptured Republican spectrum? From where I’m sitting, that doesn’t appear likely.
There are only two of the original musical Outlaws left now, it seems, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. And seriously, I think I’d rather vote for Willie as a representative leader of America than I would for either Trump or Cruz.
Jack Whyte is a Kelowna author of 15 best-selling novels. Email jack@jackwhyte.com or read more at jackwhyte.com.